


Second Verse, Same As The First

by LadyShadowphyre



Series: Familiar'verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Do Not Mess With Dean On Sam's Watch, Gen, Protective Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester Zine, Stanford Era (Supernatural), Victor Henrickson Does Not Believe In Magic, Witch Sam Winchester, until he does
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 19:57:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18431033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyShadowphyre/pseuds/LadyShadowphyre
Summary: Very few things got under Sam Winchester's skin faster than someone comparing him to his father or his brother Dean being in trouble. When Dean was arrested and used his one phone call to ring Sam at Stanford, Sam hopped the next plane out, because nobody had as many tricks up their sleeve for getting his big brother out of trouble with the law as Sam Winchester, practicing witch... even if he had to break a few rules to do it.





	Second Verse, Same As The First

**Author's Note:**

> Prequel to the Familiar'verse, but can stand alone. First appearance in the free online Sam Winchester Zine.

**V** ERY FEW THINGS got under Sam Winchester's skin as quickly as someone comparing him to his father or his brother Dean being threatened. John Winchester, may he rest in pieces as far as Sam was concerned, had nearly killed Sam and Dean on multiple occasions through negligence (and, one could argue, through reckless endangerment in the name of hunting the supernatural creatures preying on humans before they were legally adults) and very nearly killed Sam directly when it became painfully obvious that the strange things that happened around him weren't just tricks of chance or coincidences but actual supernatural powers. Dean had been the one to save Sam, to knock the gun out of John's hand and restrain him until he passed out, then helped Sam make a run for it. While Sam having powers might have unnerved the hell out of him, it wasn't enough to override eighteen years of conditioning to "take care of Sammy", and Sam knew he owed his brother his life for that alone even without all the other times they had been saving each other on hunts.

When Dean was arrested and used his one phone call to ring Sam at Stanford and tell him that their father was dead and he'd been arrested as an accessory to multiple counts of grave desecration, credit card fraud, destruction of property, and suspected murder, Sam had asked him to give him the number for the police station and assured him that he was on the next flight out. He'd called the police station after reaching the airport to tell them that he was on his way, only to be informed that the FBI had taken over the case and that Agent Victor Hendrickson was pushing to have Dean transferred to his custody and locked up in maximum security. Sam wasn't entirely sure what he had said to the poor woman on the other end of the phone, but she was calling him sir and assuring him that Dean would not be released to anyone without his authorization and that he would have a meeting with Agent Hendrickson directly upon his arrival.

And so it was that Sam found himself seated on the opposite side of a plain brown desk in an unused office of the police station, staring down Agent Victor Hendrickson with an outward expression of calm while inside he  _ seethed _ . This man had been tracking John Winchester and, by association, him and Dean,  _ hunting _ them because his brain couldn't grasp the truth behind what looked like dug up and burned corpses, a thankless job that earned them no legal money for food or shelter, and he was  _ proud  _ of it.  _ Proud _ of having finally caught up to Dean, at least, because Sam was "clean" and at school and John had "escaped justice" by being dead.

One of John's iron-clad rules for hunting was secrecy, insisting that "civilians" - by which he meant anyone who wasn't a hunter, even if they had more legal law enforcement authority than any of them - be kept in the dark about the supernatural "for their own safety and sanity".  _ "Nobody wants to know about this world," _ he'd said.  _ "Best to let them keep their innocence while they can." _

Sam was done with following John's rules if it meant seeing Dean locked up like an animal, and Agent Hendrickson had nothing on a werewolf out for blood and human hearts under light of the full moon.

"You're saying you claim to be a witch?" Agent Hendrickson was saying, all raised eyebrows and skepticism like any civilian who hadn't run up against anything otherworldly he couldn't explain away with a convenient lie.

"That's right," Sam nodded, tilting his head to one side and regarding the Fed with a tiny little smile, deliberately keeping his posture confident and relaxed. "Wanna see a magic trick, Agent?"

"Yeah, sure, go for it," the Fed agreed with an indulgent smile, no doubt expecting some slight of hand or a card trick that a hundred different stage magicians had done before. Well, he had given permission without requesting specification, so Sam was under no obligation to cater to his illusions.

"Alright then," he purred, sitting up straight and feeling a dark thrill run through him at the flash of unease in the Agent's face. He ruthlessly squashed it - darkness had no place here - and cleared his mind the way his mentor out in Palo Alto had taught him as he lifted both hands, palms out, then turned them palms in, showing the emptiness of his hands and the bare skin of his wrists. "Nothing up my sleeve...."

There was a scratch and a scrape of wood and plastic on concrete, and then the desk between them began to rise up off the ground. Hendrickson cursed, eyes wide, and then had to grip the arms of his chair as it, too, lifted into the air along with Sam's own chair until the two of them were seated across from each other on opposite sides of the desk exactly as they had been... three feet or so above the floor. He looked around, looked down and up, waved a hand above the desk and his own head, shifted in his chair like he was feeling for the floor beneath him and finding nothing, and then looked back at Sam with the first real signs of fear. "What the hell?!"

"Calm down, Agent," Sam said, as smooth and easy as he had been since he had entered the station and been shown into the office to find Hendrickson waiting. "It's only magic."

"Magic," Hendrickson repeated, stunned and disbelieving. "Magic isn't--"

"Real? Oh, I assure you, Agent Hendrickson," Sam said as he shifted his focus and the desk and chairs slowly began rotating around a central axis point. "It's very real. This? This is just telekinesis. A 'party trick power', if you will. I don't really want to scare you or the good officers outside, Agent, just get your attention."

"Well, you've got it!" Agent Hendrickson blurted out, clutching harder at the arms of the chair. "You've got my attention, Winchester!"

"I'm glad to hear it," Sam said pleasantly. He let the desk and chairs slow in their rotation before coming to a stop almost 180 degrees from their original positions, hoping the change of direction would drive home that this wasn't some illusion or trick of perception like hypnosis. "While I have your attention, though, I'd like to tell you a little bit about hunting. Not deer or game hunting, though. Hunters like John and Dean Winchester. Hunters like me. See, while you were busy hunting  _ us _ , we were hunting down a different kind of killer, the kind that will never see the inside of a jail cell because they almost never get caught by the authorities, and the rare times they do they're out just as quickly, killing more people, ruining more lives.

"You can't arrest ghosts, after all, Agent Hendrickson," Sam told him as the drawer of the desk in front of the Fed slid open and a pencil floated up out of it. "Ghosts are already dead. It's in bad taste to prosecute a corpse, though I understand there was a pope a few centuries ago who did exactly that. But the ghosts don't really know they're dead. They're trapped here, missed their ride to the afterlife, and when something sets them off and bodies start dropping, well, you can't reason with a ghost who's been pushed to that point. The only thing you can do to help them is sever their tether to mortality. Usually it's a body, but sometimes it's an item they were tied closely to. Salt to purify, fire to burn the connection.

"Unfortunately, salting and burning like that tends to lead to accusations of grave desecration, theft, property destruction... It's inconvenient, especially when you want people to keep their innocence about things like this." The pencil spun in a slow arc, then began drawing figure eights. "But it's even worse when it's shape-shifters. See, there's a lot of different types of shape-shifters. Black dogs, skinwalkers, lycanthropes... and some are benign, just trying to live their lives, but the killers... the killers are trouble.

"Would you go looking for a human when you find a victim who looked like they'd been torn apart by wild animals, Agent?" Sam asked, leaning forward in his chair while carefully not touching the desk. "If you had several eye witnesses claiming that a very specific person killed their best friend or girlfriend, even though that same person was accounted for on the opposite side of the city, would you keep looking for the killer or arrest the person named by the witnesses?

"Black dogs and skinwalkers rip their victims to pieces. Werewolves rip their victims' hearts out to eat, though the responsible ones will take steps to lock themselves up so they don't hurt people. Humanoid shapeshifters only need DNA from a target and they can change into a near-perfect copy of the person, complete with a mental link to access their memories enough to fool everyone who knows them right up until they kill a loved one out of nowhere or their eyes shine silver. Speaking of silver, that's the only thing that can kill one-- a silver blade or bullet to the heart, and that really is the only way to stop them when they've reached the point of multiple kills.

"Now vampires," Sam added as the pencil spun in a lazy arc from one side of the desk to the other, Agent Hendrickson's eyes tracking it out of reflex before snapping back to Sam. "Vampires are commonly thought to be extinct these days after a hunter named Daniel Elkin took out a bunch of them. They aren't, though, just smarter, better able to hide themselves in plain sight. Sunlight doesn't burn them, crosses don't repel them... dead man's blood can slow them down, but they don't die unless you chop their heads off, and the ones who subsist on animal blood from cattle mutilations aren't going around killing people so if you find cattle mutilations and decapitated bodies, well, that's when you've got an extremist hunter on your hands and that's an awkward area.

"See, the hunter will be absolutely convinced that they're right," Sam said, steepling his fingers in front of his face. "They've been chasing the evil killers of the supernatural world for so long that evil killers are all they see when anything supernatural comes up. Vampires that don't eat people? Impossible. Shapeshifters not out to ruin someone's life by framing them for murder or robbery? Can't be true. A kid with psychic powers and an affinity for plant-based magic? Must have made a deal with a demon. And because they've devoted their whole lives to finding the evil killers of the supernatural world and killing them before they can kill others, extremists won't stop to look at evidence before pulling the trigger.

"John Winchester was starting to become an extremist the day I left for Stanford," Sam said, all seriousness as he lowered his hands and locked eyes with Hendrickson. "I was his son, and because I have powers he was ready to shoot me through the heart with an iron bullet, convinced that because I have powers then I had to be just as evil as the witch he tracked down as connected to the demon responsible for killing my mother in my nursery when I was a baby.

"Dean saved me. He stopped John from firing, helped me run and stay gone, out of the hunt and safe at Stanford where I could study and find other people with powers to help me learn to better control mine. He was always Dad's perfect little soldier, toeing the line and training to be a hunter well before he should have ever had a gun in his hands. But he was also my brother and, in a lot of ways, my parent when Dad was gone on a hunt or gone into the bottle. He talked about hunting like we were heroes, saving people by killing the things that would hurt them, the things normal law enforcement couldn't handle because they didn't believe those things existed and would just let a case go cold when they couldn't find a perp because the perp was a ghost being denied their eternal rest."

The chairs began to lower, causing a renewed clutching of the armrests from Hendrickson. The desk followed. Sam's chair came to rest first, gently settling to the floor. Agent Hendrickson's chair landed a little more sharply moments later, followed by the desk coming to rest neatly between them. The pencil slowed its gentle tumbling to a stop and hovered in mid-air as Sam sat back and tilted his head to one side again, regarding Agent Hendrickson with that same tiny smile from before. "Any questions? Or shall we talk about that paperwork you need to get my brother cleared of charges?"

Silence descended in the office. Hendrickson looked from Sam to the pencil and then back to Sam. He swallowed.

"C-credit card fraud?" he croaked.

"Hunting doesn't pay a salary," Sam answered. "Food, nightly shelter, gas and car maintenance, medical supplies, specialized weaponry like silver blades, rock salt, shotgun shells, silver and iron bullets... These things don't grow on trees, and our country's capitalist empire ensures that it's as hard to get them as possible for people who can't stay in one place because things are chasing them. Given a legal alternative to credit card fraud or hustling, most would take the legal over the illegal."

"Impersonating a federal officer?"

"Hunters don't have badges and clearance to get in to see crime scenes and autopsy reports for strange deaths and forensics that don't make sense when held up to the usual suspects. Very rarely you get a hunter in law enforcement, but they have twice the mortality rate of a normal hunter because they stand just as much chance of being taken out by a human with a gun as by a werewolf or a ghost who gets in a lucky shot. Dad tried playing private investigator back in the early years, but it took longer with the stonewalling of local police so more people died before he could find what was killing them and stop it."

"Prostitution?"

"Nope," Sam shook his head, the pencil waggling back and forth in mimic of him. "I am not talking to you about my brother's sex life. Not happening."

"Fair enough," Hendrickson snorted, reaching up to rub his eyes. "It was a long shot anyway. Christ... And would you please stop floating that damn pencil at me like that? I have to fill out the paperwork in pen!"

"As you wish, Agent."

The pencil dropped.

**=End=**


End file.
